by Lucie Wilk
“He is strong and resourceful. I’m sure he will be a formidable opponent to Sapitwa.”
Alile smiles. There is a new understanding between them. After all, they share blood. They both turn and watch Ade and her grandfather talk. Something flashes between the two men, an object that her grandfather passes to Ade. It is Dr. Bryce’s reflex hammer. Now Ade has it. He slips it into his pocket. Then they watch as Ade waves to them, walks across the yard and slips through the partition in the fence, heading to the mountain, heading out to save the mzungu.
*
There. He opens his eyes and sees Sapitwa again. It looms in front of him. The sun is high and bright but somehow Sapitwa remains dark, a jutting stab of obsidian on the white-blue sky. He gets up, stumbles forward, trips, falls. He is on his knees in front of it. It is still there. Sapitwa. He says the name out loud. Sapitwa. It glowers at him.
Henry struggles up again. He doesn’t feel his legs anymore, but they are down there, below him, propelling him forward. He runs across the field, no longer stumbling, no longer tired. He moves so fast, so fast he is not running but flying across the field. He soars over the grass and Sapitwa grows until it is all he can see. The blue sky is consumed by the dark peak of the mountain and he feels its shade on his face. His legs fling him forward and then the earth drops off. The field falls away from him. He is in the air for a moment. For a moment he is suspended, exhilarated, part of the sky. He soars toward Sapitwa.
But the mountain reaches up, paws at him with clawed swipes, rough jabs of pain as bushes grab at his skin and clothes, grapple him to the ground and then, abruptly, he stops.
His head throbs because it is downhill from his legs. He pulls and rearranges himself until he is sitting up. It is a steep slope and he didn’t see it coming. He can see the sharp drop from the plateau where he had been running when he fell. And there, in the opposite direction and just a few more metres ahead of him, Sapitwa rises, more enormous and impenetrable than it had appeared from afar.
He is now in its shade. It is cooler here, but not breezy. The air stagnates in this little pocket of space between the plateau and the peak. He closes his eyes, just for a moment. He needs to regain some strength and energy if he is to proceed. And he will need to go further if he is to orient himself on this beast of a mountain. He will need to scale Sapitwa. He looks up at it. It is no longer a peak on a mountain, it is a wall.
It seems to rise straight up out of the ground. Yes, there are cracks and crevices that he could use as handholds, but to do so without a harness would be an outrageous risk. He remembers Ellison remarking that some people climb it with gear, but others have done it with nothing. Ellison himself has climbed it without ropes or harnesses.
He looks at it again. Straight up, for God’s sake. Maybe there is a gentler slope by another approach. After resting here for a while, he will walk around its perimeter. He will find a safer approach. He leans back on the side of the mountain and watches Sapitwa out of half-closed eyes.
*
The village is quiet—most are in their huts preparing for the dinner meal—as Alile and Iris walk together, hands held behind them, heads down, watching their dresses swish in front of them with each step. Although they could not look more different, they are the same person. This is what Iris is discovering. And Alile’s existence alone verifies many of Iris’s suspicions.
Alile is younger than Iris, six years younger. Alile was born the year Iris and her family left the village. Six years was the age Iris was when her mother lost the baby, a baby that would have been her last sibling, a baby that Iris was told was stillborn, dead in the uterus before it could take a breath of air.
Iris looks at Alile.
“Your eyes … ” Iris begins.
“They are strange. No one has them.”
Iris realizes that Alile has never borne witness to her maternal lineage, has never seen her own eyes on any other face. She wonders what Alile has been told about her mother. Alile, too, must feel adrift. This is what unites them, she and Alile, this feeling of floating without an anchor.
“They are remarkable.” She finally says, arriving at a truthful statement she will not be ashamed of.
Alile looks down and that bright glow disappears under her eyelids. Iris looks away, ashamed anyway.
“Ade says they make me special. He says that when he saw them for the first time, he knew I would be a great sing’anga.”
Iris looks over at Alile again. She thinks about her own unremarkable nursing career, how lacking in greatness it is. Pushing the medical cart after silent doctors. Helping them collect body fluids: blood, spinal fluid, ascites, stool, urine. Helping them give medication. Helping them find reasons to give up: resistant infection, AIDS, poverty. “Bad Substrate” as they sometimes said in conversations she stood at the edges of, shrugging their shoulders. There was nothing anyone could do about Bad Substrate. And this land is full of people with Bad Substrate.
Again Iris thinks of her grandmother’s whispers, her predictions and promises. It seems that Alile has gained this special privilege and Iris, despite her own lineage, her grandfather being one of the most skilled healers, was left out. Shut out of what could have been. She thinks of her mother, undoubtedly sitting alone in her little home, preparing dinner. Does she feel any guilt for what she has done? For what has she been trying to keep Iris and her siblings away from all these years? For what pushed her to leave this place? For what compels her to press her lips together whenever Iris asks her about the village, her own childhood, even her father?
Her mother has said little about her father to Iris. Iris is the only one who asks about him. Her siblings are more prepared to turn away from the past. They prefer to face the rising sun, but Iris prefers to watch it set. And when her mother opens up a little, tells her a morsel of information about the village or her father, or her sister Grace, Iris feels that warm sun on her face again, Iris closes her eyes and lets the story wash over her.
“Have you learned much from Ade?” She asks Alile this, and keeps her voice neutral.
Alile looks at Iris sideways, out of the corners of her eyes. “He shares many things, but I have to be willing to trust him. That is the only way he can lead me. If I am completely blind.”
“Do you trust him, then?”
They stop walking. Alile looks down at her hands which she stretches out in front of her, as though the answer is written on them somewhere. But no, Iris realizes, the answer is not written there; it is not written anywhere, and that is how it can be known.
“Yes.” Alile says to her hands, and then they resume their slow pace.
“What about you, Iris? You are a sing’anga in the city. Who teaches you?”
Iris pauses. “I am a nurse. Not a sing’anga. And I had many teachers. Most of them books. The books taught me a lot.”
Alile twists her mouth, undoubtedly trying to imagine learning from an object, symbols on a page. How strange it all suddenly seems. Yet she knows that she could not live without books. Through books she has access to so much, to complete worlds outside of herself. She feels the pride in her, deep down. She is proud of her accomplishments. Just like her mother.
“I learned a lot from books,” she repeats. “I have read a lot of books.”
Alile nods, in a way that seems to respect this method of learning, imported from a place that clearly has so much more than they do. Encouraged by Alile’s reaction, she continues.
“You can know much from the body. Such as the pressure in a patient’s blood vessels. The Blood Pressure. We can measure it. When it is too low or too high it can be dangerous. And the heart.” Iris raises her right hand to her chest, places it just under her left breast, places her fingers between the ribs there and feels the organ pushing out between the ribs and touching her fingers. “The heart can push too hard, beat too fast, or it can push too slow. When that happens, fluid collects
in the lungs, and the patient will have trouble breathing.”
“And then?” says Alile. “And then what? What can be done?”
“It depends,” says Iris, “it’s complicated.” She looks over at Alile and Alile is smiling, looking at her.
“You enjoy it.” This is not a question. Alile has seen something in Iris, something she has never seen herself.
“And you? You enjoy learning from Ade?”
Alile runs a hand across her head, across the short-cropped hair that follows her scalp so closely. “It is difficult at times. He has me practice a lot in the garden. Once in a while he will leave me with someone. Someone who is ill. He will just leave. And I am expected to listen. If I listen carefully enough, I can hear them. And then I know.” She stops herself, as though realizing she has gone too far, said too much. She looks around.
They are alone as they approach Iris’s aunt’s hut. The village is quiet. The sun is low down and red. It is Iris’s favourite time of day. But now she thinks of Bryce, spending his second night on the mountain. She looks over at it. It is awash in sunset red that creeps slowly across the rock. The other side, the side not facing the sun is dark. Almost black. She wonders which side he is on, which blanket covers him now. The red or the black.
Alile takes her hand. “Let’s go in and have some food.”
She leads her through the fence where Iris’s aunt is waiting.
*
Something tickles Henry’s arm. This is what wakes him, this tickle on his arm that progresses from his wrist to his elbow in an instant. Feathery but firm, a certain weight to it, pressing on his skin at points in rapid succession. He opens his eyes to see the spider treading up his arm, advancing with a menace that only a spider can possess.
Henry jerks upright and shakes his arm. The thing drops off with a weight. He can hear it land. He is standing now, and stares down at the spider. It does not scurry away. Instead, it waits. It is the size of the larger ones he had seen in the city, a bit smaller than his fist. Almost certainly poisonous. When it was on him, a foot away from his head, he could see its face, or what could be considered its face. The area where its eyes are clustered, and its dagger-like fangs.
What is the safe thing to do? If he moves, will it leap back on him? Will this precipitate a bite? How fast can the thing move? What the hell is the thing doing this high up the mountain, anyway? Before he can make a move, right or wrong, the spider sidles away and disappears underground.
Too easy, he thinks. When he takes a breath in, he becomes aware of how tight his chest had been. These creatures can sense the slightest currents of air. It could probably smell him from metres away. But there was no need for such acute sensory talents for this encounter; he must have been lying on top of its lair, for God’s sake. He has been let off with a warning.
The mountain shifts under him. If he remains very still, he can feel the compression and expansion of its breaths. He can feel the heat coming off of it.
It is the mountain’s own rising impatience that compels him to move. He slips and stumbles and falls down the remaining slope to the base of Sapitwa. When he stands again he feels light. Lighter than the air up here, like helium that expands and expands into the space it occupies. His vision is dotted with the spinning, moving atoms he shares the space with. Nothing is still. He tilts his head back and looks up the flank of Sapitwa. It reaches high, and from here he cannot see where it ends.
He has not touched it. He brings his gaze back down to the slab in front of him. He reaches out a hand, fingers extended, and closes the gap between them. Sapitwa slides under his fingertips and he feels it shudder. He leaves his hand there on the warm stone. He presses down his whole palm then he strokes it, feels the pits and grooves under his fingertips, the thick and gnarled folds. He slips his fingers into the grooves and grasps hold and then does the same with his other hand. He has a firm grip on the rock now. So firm that he could lift himself, if he were to try. He looks down and nudges a toe into one of the larger crevices about a foot off the ground. He places his whole weight onto this foot and lifts off the ground, pushing up with his toe and holding on with both his hands. He hangs there for a moment, afraid to breathe. He is clinging to the side of this beast, hanging on to its thick hide, willing to go wherever it is willing to take him.
Even here, just a foot off the ground, he feels a surge of power. The air still spins in front of him as he reaches higher up, steps his second foot onto a ledge above his first foot. So easy. Why did he think he needed a different approach? It is as though the mountain is leaning over, making it easier for him, creating folds where there were none before, just for his next hand or foot. He reaches again, grabs and pulls himself higher, steps higher, feels the air move around him, sees the particles of air spinning around him, sees a vortex of particles whirl together upwards, like an inverted tornado, in some sort of organized chaos. He follows this vortex where it seems to be pointing him: up, up, up the flank of the beast. And he steps up. It is as if he is walking, it is that easy. There is such strength in his arms and his legs, they are infused with some new blood, better blood, blood that can do miraculous things. This blood pounds through him with more force than usual, it pulses through each limb; he can see each bolus muscling through his narrowed vessels with each clench of his heart, in each limb, all the way to his fingertips which sink into the folds of the mountain, this mountain that is starting to feel warm and soft, as if he is crawling up a great bosom, as if he could nestle into the cleavage of it, as if it would nuzzle him there, whisper reassurances, keep him safe and fed.
He feels like crying and then he is; great wracking sobs that heave through him. Some kind of terrible loneliness inside him that needs to come out. Once it is released, he will be better. He lets it crawl out of him, this black misery. It slips down the mountainside leaving him lighter, without its burden and he wonders again at the power and strength of this mountain, this place, this miracle.
Clinging to the mountainside, he leans back a little, looks up. Sapitwa still reaches up beyond him, beyond what he can imagine himself ever reaching, no matter how hard he tries. Behind him, beside him, below him is air: not still. No, not still. It spins around him. It collides into him. It pushes him, pulls at him, nudges him, teases him, distracts him with its movement, its empty infinity that envelops him, suffocates him, makes his hands weaken, makes his fingers tire where they grip the breast of Sapitwa, unwilling to part.
Things begin to slip. First, his fingers. They become moist and no matter how hard he tries, they slip out of Sapitwa, slide down her skin. His toes shift in place and he finds another crevice where they might have more room. He stands on his toes, feels the ache in his calves, runs his fingers across Sapitwa but she has smoothed herself out; there are no more grooves or crevices, the rock is impenetrable. Marble skin. Alabaster. And she has tired of him, turned one flawless shoulder to him now. The ledges where he had been resting his feet sink in, the rock becomes featureless.
He slides, still grasping for a moment, and then falls. Drops off her smooth body and down. Down onto a pillow of air that cradles him only briefly before he hits the ground with a crumpling silence.
Chapter 20
Iris’s aunt greets Alile and Iris at the door of her hut. They step inside. All traces of her nursing uniform and her long hair are gone now. Iris threw the flower she’d made out of her dress into the fire last night. Flames danced around it. It remained a black heap, a dark spot inside the fire for so long. It was still there, the black flower in the fire, when she was pulled away.
The girl is there. Alile’s daughter, Mkele. She looks up at them when they enter and then gets up and runs into her mother’s legs. Iris steps away and watches them hug. She wonders who Mkele’s father is. Where are all the fathers? Who are all the fathers? All these women without a man. She thinks: when there are too few men, there is trouble. Iris busies herself with the food, set
s the eating area, lights the lantern, tries to shift this thought out of her mind.
This is her mother’s thought, planted in her mind. Her mother said this: when there are too few men, there is trouble. And yet she took her children away, to the city, to raise all these children alone without a man. When she needed help, she recruited it from the women in their new neighbourhood. The men she kept away. The men she used for money. No man ever set foot in their new home in the city. The closest they got was a knock on the door. Her brother was the only one, and he didn’t count as until recently, he had just been a child.
Now he is a man. Her brother has grown into a big, tall man. He works in a bar, ogling women, pushing sweaty beers across the counter, grinning his grin. Her brother with his broken arm. Your brother has a broken arm, I have a broken heart. This is another thing her mother said. More reasons to stay away from the village. The village is where hearts and arms are broken. And lives. Her father’s life was broken here, too.
Iris stands up from where she has been spooning out the relish onto plates. She blinks and looks around. She is the closest she has been to where her father lost his life. Suddenly she wants to see the spot where he was killed. She wants to see the ground where he lay, where his broken body breathed its last breaths. Where the white man stood staring, hands on his hips, as he died in front of him. She wants to see this place.
Her aunt and Alile are chatting amiably, waiting for the meal to be served and she is standing there with a dripping spoon. She can’t go tonight. But tomorrow. Tomorrow she will go to this place. She will go where she might be able to feel him. She has not felt her father in so many years.